Here is the question: what constitutes a good explanation of phenomena?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian EconomyDaniel J. GargolaDennis P. Kehoe. Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xiv 1 269 pp. Cloth, $42.50, £29.95 (UK, Europe).This book is more than an investigation into an aspect of Roman law and legal thought. At the very beginning, Dennis Kehoe clearly identifies his goal: “My (...) purpose in this study is to clarify the basic relationships characterizing the agrarian economy of the early Roman Empire by analyzing the economic mentality that guided upper-class Romans in managing their wealth. My conviction is that the type of agrarian planning based on upper-class conceptions of investment and profit played a fundamental role in shaping the Roman economy as a whole.... In this study, I propose to address this problem by analyzing the assumptions that the Roman jurists in the Digest of Justinian and in other classical sources made about investment and profit in agriculture as they addressed legal issues involving private property. I base my analysis on the legal sources because, as I shall demonstrate, they offer a more comprehensive picture of the economic interests of upper-class Romans than we can gain from other types of evidence, including literary evidence, documentary papyri, and inscriptions” (vii).The author’s awareness of the problems in using legal evidence to shed light on larger issues and his openness about his own assumptions and about the limitations of the methods and the sources he has chosen to employ are among the work’s great strengths. In marked contrast with some other investigations of such matters, Kehoe does not assume that laws provide a simple, straightforward, and transparent entry into the structure and organization of economy and society. The work opens with an examination of the legal sources as evidence. Their condition offers one problem. The writings of the late Republican and early Imperial jurists are preserved largely in relatively brief citations included in the great collections of the sixth-century a.d.: Justinian’s Digest and Code. As Kehoe notes, this presents a major problem for investigators: to what extent do these passages represent the original—that is, was obsolete material removed systematically, and were the passages adjusted to fit the compilers’ concerns? Following authorities such as M. Kaser and F. Wieacker, the author takes an optimistic view of the matter, suggesting that “contemporary scholarship is justified in moving away from the suspicion that the Digest is so thoroughly interpolated that the opinions of the classical jurists can only be recovered after exhaustive reconstruction of the texts” (9). While accepting the possibility of interpolation in individual cases, he has based his study on the “belief that the existing collections of legal texts do allow us to trace the thinking, in particular the economic thinking, of the classical Roman legal authorities” (10).Having declared his intention to regard the citations as reasonably accurate reflections of their originals, Kehoe then turns to a more central question: the extent to which juristic writings reflect actual conditions. One school of [End Page 323] thought, represented by scholars such as Alan Watson (The Spirit of Roman Law [Athens, Ga., 1995]), suggests that Roman jurists operated within a system of traditional representations, maintained as if fossilized long after the conditions that had given rise to them had changed, and that legal writers largely wrote about internal problems in interpretation that had arisen within this system. The jurists, then, did not address problems of their own day, nor were they interested in adapting the law to new circumstances, and their opinions need bear little resemblance to actual arrangements in their own time and place. Others, however, are more convinced of the timeliness of Roman legal writing. Scholars such as B. W. Frier (Landlords and Tenants in Imperial Rome [Princeton 1980]) and S. D. Martin (The Roman Jurists and the Organization of Private Building in the Late Republic and Early Empire [Brussels 1989]) maintain that Roman jurists consciously and directly addressed in their writings the social and economic concerns of their contemporaries in the governing elite.Once again, Kehoe takes care to situate... (shrink)

This paper focuses on school choice and the extent to which admissions to publicly-funded secondary schools in England address issues of equity and social justice. It argues that schools with responsibility for their own admissions are more likely than others to act in their own self interest by 'selecting in' or 'creaming' particular pupils and 'selecting out' others. Given this, it is argued that individual schools should not be responsible for admissions. Instead, admissions should be the responsibility of a local (...) authority (or non-partisan body); this body should make decisions about who should be allocated to which school on the basis of the expressed wishes of the parents, and the admissions criteria of the school in question. Admissions criteria should be objective, clear and fair and the admissions system itself should address issues of equity and social justice. It is argued that systems where there are some 'controls' on the choice process should be facilitated to address equity and social justice considerations which can benefit individuals and communities. (shrink)

This long-awaited two-volume set constitutes the definitive presentation of the system of classifying moral judgment built up by Lawrence Kohlberg and his associates over a period of twenty years. Researchers in child development and education around the world, many of whom have worked with interim versions of the system, indeed, all those seriously interested in understanding the problem of moral judgment, will find it an indispensable resource. Volume I reviews Kohlberg's stage theory, and the by-now large body of research on (...) the significance and utility of his moral stages. Issues of reliability and validity are addressed. The volume ends with detailed instructions for using the forms in Volume 2. Volume 2, in a specially-designed, user-friendly format, includes three alternative functionally-equivalent forms of the scoring system. (shrink)

The current pandemic period has triggered a series of changes in society, at both individual and collective behavioral levels. These changes were perceived as either positive or negative by the impacted bodies, leading to both social change and positive interactions in a tense context. In this paper, the authors will deal with Pandemica Panotpica, subjugation infiltrating all levels of society, and the approach adopted by several countries in trying to find countermeasures to combat the virus' proliferation. Our research scope began (...) at the onset of the pandemic and ended on early January 2021. (shrink)

Examining, for a symposium on xenophilia, the views of some of the period’s most open-minded and tolerant thinkers, as well as the historical development of Christian writers’ treatment of Muslims, this article considers whether the term Islamophilia can be applied to any Christian’s attitudes during the Middle Ages. The analysis considers what qualifies as an expression of love for Muslims, the distinction between positive regard for Islam and positive regard for Muslims, and whether Islamophilia essentializes Muslims in the same way (...) that Islamophobia does. The author argues that any search for Christian Islamophilia must be broad enough to encompass evidence found in unexpected places. For instance, due to the Christian belief that Muslims who did not convert to Christianity would suffer eternally, a desire to convert them may well qualify as a stance of love toward them, despite the offense to modern sensibilities that such implies. Paradoxically, indifference toward Muslims’ religion, such as on the part of neighbors or business partners, might also have a place in a discussion of Islamophilia, precisely because it rejects essentialism. (shrink)

Les titres donnés à la parabole de Luc 15,11-32 évoquent le plus souvent l’un de ses personnages, le fils cadet. Les deux frères ont cependant chacun leur importance. L’élément inattendu du récit n’est ni le retour du cadet ni l’accueil qui lui est fait. Les v. 12-24, centrés sur lui, ont suscité l’empathie du lecteur et certains acquis de lecture l’ont préparé à cet accueil. La surprise du récit se trouve dans l’intervention du fils aîné: son arrivée et le sommaire (...) du v. 27 révèlent le décalage entre cette fête et celles évoquées au début du chapitre 15: la thématique ‘perdu / trouvé’ et la dimension collective de la fête ont ici disparu. Alors que l’aîné est pris dans une logique de rétribution, le père évoque la fraternité en plus de la filiation, le basculement de valeurs en plus de la rétribution. L’irruption du fils aîné, en provoquant un décalage entre l’attente du lecteur et la situation racontée, est l’occasion de réaffirmer l’importance du retournement provoqué par «trouvé / perdu». Ce changement-là permet d’entrer dans la vraie joie, celle du royaume. Le retour du cadet n’est donc pas ce qui exclut l’aîné de la fête, mais au contraire ce qui permet la fête, et permet à l’aîné d’y être invité. (shrink)

A new emphasis on diversity and difference is displacing older myths of nation or community. A new attention to gender, race, language or religion is disrupting earlier preoccupations with class. But the welcome extended to heterogeneity can bring with it a disturbing fragmentation and closure. Can we develop a vision of democracy through difference: a politics that neither denies group identities nor capitulates to them? In this volume, Anne Phillips develops the feminist challenge to exclusionary versions of democracy, citizenship (...) and equality. Relating this to the crisis in socialist theory, the growing unease with the pretensions of Enlightenment rationality, and the recent recuperation of liberal democracy as the only viable politics, she builds on debates within feminism to address general questions of difference. When democracies try to wish away group difference and inequality, they fail to meet their egalitarian promise. When yearnings towards an undifferentiated unity become the basis for radical politics and change, too many groups drop out of the picture. Through her critical discussions of recent feminist and socialist theory Anne Phillips rejects this democracy of denial. She also warns, however, of the dangers on the other side. The simpler celebrations of diversity risk freezing group differences as they are, encouraging a patchwork of local identities from which people can speak only to themselves. Her arguments then combine in a powerful restatement of the case for a more active and participatory democracy. It is only through enhanced communication and discussion that people can respect and learn from their differences. (shrink)

There has been a focus on policies relating to early years education and care across the developed world and particularly in Europe. In the UK, there has been a raft of policy changes alongside increased investment. However, this paper argues that these changes may not be sufficient to meet EU objectives in terms of quality or the government's policy goals of high quality, affordable and accessible early years education and care. There are major issues that appear to militate against achieving (...) these goals; these relate to the levels of government funding and to the regulatory context. There are also divergences between the providers in terms of their own objectives and underlying values which mean that quality may be variable and access to certain types of providers restricted. These factors appear to militate against the delivery of universal provision of high quality early years education and care. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the reforms made to the quasi-market in school-based education in England that occurred between May 1997 and May 2001. It discusses the changes that have taken place in relation to parental choice, admissions to schools, school diversity, funding and examination 'league tables'. The Labour Government can be seen as having embraced the quasi-market with a similar enthusiasm to that of its Conservative predecessors although it has tended to emphasise social inclusion as opposed to competition. While it (...) has attempted to soften the edges of the quasi-market it has not tackled some of its major deficiencies such as the power that schools that are their own admission authorities have to distort the admissions process. (shrink)

Young netizens are an emerging generator of online content, engaging in an increasing number of online flaming interactions. This shortened communication mode has incorporated power amplifiers, enabling the inclusion of both verbal and non-verbal triggers, thereby initiating abuses akin to cyberbullying. Cyberbullying has emerged as an extremely unstable hot issue, which is difficult to regulate upstream, severely impacting inexperienced young netizens. This Machiavellian apparatus proves to be sophisticated, given its powerful nature, and results in its victims being ensnared in a (...) cyber net from which they see very little escape. Laws have been enacted to combat cyberbullying, which is rampant among netizens, highly naive or actively aggressive in their use of various social media platforms. (shrink)

"Deleuze plonge la critique kantienne transcendantale dans le bain dissolvant d'un empirisme renouvelé. Ce livre se propose de restituer cette entreprise, et d'analyser l'étonnante création de ce concept, que Deleuze mène depuis ses premières monographies jusqu'à Différence et Répétition dans un dialogue fécond avec l'histoire de la philosophie. Par quelles opérations de distorsion et de collage, Deleuze compose-t-il l'empirisme de Hume, la théorie du signe comme force de Nietzsche, le virtuel et les multiplicités de Bergson, les modes de Spinoza, les (...) individualisations impersonnelles de Simondon pour renouveler la théorie kantienne du transcendantal? C'est tout l'objet de cette enquête, qui permet d'entrer dans le laboratoire du penseur, pour saisir la philosophie se faisant, mais qui permet également d'expliquer l'insistance du transcendantal dans toute son oeuvre"--P. [4] of cover. (shrink)

WINNER BEST SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY BOOK IN 2021 / NASSP BOOK AWARD 2022 -/- Together we can often achieve things that are impossible to do on our own. We can prevent something bad from happening or we can produce something good, even if none of us could do it by herself. But when are we morally required to do something of moral importance together with others? This book develops an original theory of collective moral obligations. These are obligations that individual moral (...) agents hold jointly, but not as unified collective agents. To think of some of our obligations as joint or collective is the best way of making sense of our intuitions regarding collective moral action problems. Where we have reason to believe that our efforts are most efficient as part of a collective endeavor we may incur collective obligations together with others who are similarly placed as long as we are able to establish compossible individual contributory strategies towards that goal. The book concludes with a discussion of “massively shared obligations” to large-scale moral problems such as global poverty. (shrink)

Across 13 essays "e; 12 of which were previously unavailable in English "e; Deleuze specialist Anne Sauvagnargues reveals the continuing potential of Deleuze, Guattari and Simondon to invent new concepts and new modes of creativity and existence. She redeploys their work, together with other key philosophers including Bergson, Lacan, Deligny and Ruyer, to create new concepts including geophilosophy, the artmachine, the ritornello, schizoanalysis and the machinic assemblage.

Who gets to decide what it means to live a healthy lifestyle, and how important a healthy lifestyle is to a good life? As more governments make preventing obesity and diet-related illness a priority, it's become more important to consider the ethics and acceptability of their efforts. When it comes to laws and policies that promote healthy eating--such as special taxes on sugary drinks and the banning of food deemed unhealthy--critics argue that these policies are paternalistic, and that they limit (...) individual autonomy over food choices. In Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach, Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti show that both paternalistic justifications for healthy eating efforts and anti-paternalistic arguments against them can be grounded in perfectionist views that overly prioritize some values over others. The authors therefore propose a more inclusive, public reason approach to healthy eating policy that will be appealing to those who take pluralism and cultural diversity seriously, by providing a framework through which different kinds of values, including but not limited to autonomy and health, can be factored into the public justification for healthy eating efforts. Additionally, the book adopts a 'farm to fork' approach to the ethics of healthy eating efforts: it engages with theories and debates in political philosophy, considers the implications of different theoretical positions for healthy eating efforts, and then develops a concrete tool for assessing policies that will be of interest to both scholars and policymakers. As well as offering a novel normative analysis of healthy eating policy, the authors offer a new theoretical framework that will be applicable to a wide range of public policy scenarios. (shrink)

Democracy is the central political issue of our age, yet debates over its nature and goals rarely engage with feminist concerns. Now that women have the right to vote, they are thought to present no special problems of their own. But despite the seemingly gender-neutral categories of individual or citizen, democratic theory and practice continues to privilege the male. This book reconsiders dominant strands in democratic thinking - focusing on liberal democracy, participatory democracy, and twentieth century versions of civic republicanism (...) - and approaches these from a feminist perspective. Anne Phillips explores the under-representation of women in politics, the crucial relationship between public and private spheres, and the lessons of the contemporary women's movement as an experience in participatory democracy. (shrink)

Colombia padece la imagen de que, desde sus inicios como colonia española hasta el presente, el país ha sido controlado por la oligarquía. Este ensayo examinará las evidencias que apuntan a esta alegación y confirmará que en sus inicios la Nación sí fue dominado por un grupo élite y reducido. Sin embargo, en años modernos, la oligarquía persiste pero que un grupo más extendido--una para-oligarquía o el Establecimiento--tiene mayor incidencia en las determinaciones en el progreso del país a través de (...) los factores psico-sociales de cooptación y transfuguismo. (shrink)

Although non-profit organisations typically have high representation of females on their boards, relatively little is known about the effects of gender diversity in these organisations particularly in relation to financial management. In this archival study, resource dependency theory and agency analysis are combined to provide theoretical insight and empirical analysis of gender diversity on effective financial management in member-governed, community financial institutions. The investigation is possible due to the unique characteristics of the organisational form and region being examined—credit unions in (...) Northern Ireland. The sector has not been subject to external regulation on board gender, yet a wide array of gender mix on boards ranging from 100 % male to 100 % female are in existence. In addition, effective financial management is crucial to their survival and their ability to meet member objectives. Boards with higher female representation exhibit superior financial management first, in respect of loan book quality in the period of austerity following the financial crisis and second when measured against return on assets. (shrink)

_Learning to Teach Religious Education in the Secondary School_ draws together insights from current educational theory and the best contemporary classroom teaching and learning, and suggests tasks, activities, and further reading designed to enhance the quality of initial school experience for the student teacher. It aims to support teachers in developing levels of religious and theological literacy, both of individual pupils and the society as a whole. Practising teachers and students will appreciate this comprehensive and accessible introduction to the craft (...) of teaching Religious Education in the secondary school. (shrink)

William Reddy, professeur d’histoire et d’anthropologie culturelle à l’université Duke, auteur du livre The Navigation of Feeling, est un pionnier de l’histoire des émotions. Son dernier ouvrage, The Making of Romantic Love, est le résultat de dix années de recherche. Il y traite des origines de l’amour courtois dans une perspective comparatiste, ayant trait à l’histoire globale. Son ouvrage ambitieux s’adresse à la fois aux étudiants et aux chercheurs qui s’intéressent au genre, à l’amour, a...

Si l ’ on peut bien affirmer que certains Sceptiques s ’ auto-réfutent, ce n ’ est pas le cas de Sextus Empiricus. En distinguant entre les modèles auto-référentiel et performatif de l ’ auto-réfutation auxquels on confronte les problèmes anciens du Menteur et du renversement ( peritropè ), on peut montrer que Sextus recourt à ce qu ’ il désigne par le mot sumperigraphè, qu ’ il convient de considérer comme un schème topologique verbal (une boucle récursive). Il ressort (...) que Sextus circonscrit la logique dont relève l ’ auto-réfutation, dans un effet réfléchissant et abyssal, rejoignant la grande tradition sceptique du théâtre grec. (shrink)

This paper derives from an exploration of the ways in which the letters of Holocaust writer Etty Hillesum, which are seemingly resistant to many of the interests of current trauma theory, can be read in relation to contemporary writing on testimonial. In particular, the three theorists I shall discuss here, Derrida, Caruth and Irigaray, directly address Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a central text in the current refiguring of trauma. This paper traces the ways in which Hillesum's letters can be (...) read across the theoretical accounts. An interpretation of Hillesum's writing emerges in which the conventional emphasis on the mystical aspect of her texts is reinterpreted in terms of Caruth's emphasis on the life drive. Viewed as forging a creative language of departure, Hillesum's letters are situated in a central relation to the most recent developments in the theoretical discourse around testimony. (shrink)

The central questions addressed in this paper are: (1) how are forms related to predication? And (2) what role do forms and predication play in the discovery and articulation of truth? The first section of the paper provides—in broad strokes—a synopsis of Plato’s account of forms. The second section considers predication in relation to forms showing that the existence and nature of forms is a necessary condition for predication, and that Plato’s account of predication is consistent with, in fact, anticipates, (...) Aristotle’s treatment of reality in the Categories. The conclusion of the paper is that forms and predication are central to philosophical hermeneutics, to the discovery and articulation of truth. (shrink)

OverviewEn 1979, la revue Meta publiait, sous la direction de Jean-Claude Gémar, un numéro spécial consacré, pour une première fois, à la traduction juridique comme activité et discipline autonomes au sein de la jeune traductologie [8]. Ce numéro reste une référence devant la persévérance et la rigueur manifestées par le Bureau des traductions d’alors et l’action, inspirée et audacieuse, du ministère de la Justice du Canada , qui laissaient entrevoir l’avènement d’une «jurilinguistique» en gestation. Cette tentative de refrancisation du langage (...) du droit canadien par le biais de lois bilingues, corédigées et non plus traduites, allait connaître une fortune peu commune. L’exemple canadien et son modèle de «lisibilité» de la loi se sont en effet répandus, inspirant de nombreux États aux quatre coins du monde. Quelques années plus tard, en 1982, le Conseil de la langue française du Québec publiait, sous la direction de J-C Gémar, un ouvrage collectif bilingue trai .. (shrink)

The essay seeks to harness the diverse and innovative work to date of legal semiotics. It seeks to bring together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a preclusion to identifying fertile avenues for research.

We use generic sentences like ‘Blondes are stupid’ to express stereotypes. But why is this? Does the fact that we use generic sentences to express stereotypes mean that stereotypes are themselves, in some sense, generic? I argue that they are. However, stereotypes are mental and generics linguistic, so how can stereotypes be generic? My answer is that stereotypes are generic in virtue of the beliefs they contain. Stereotypes about blondes being stupid contain a belief element, namely a belief that blondes (...) are stupid. This belief is an attitude taken towards the same proposition expressed by the sentence ‘Blondes are stupid’, hence why we use the latter to articulate the former. -/- This generic account of stereotypes can help us better understand their inner workings. I focus on one feature of generics, variability in the types of facts that can make them true, and argue that it can explain how stereotypes shape inferential patterns and thereby guide how we treat members of stereotyped groups. This feature, in turn, illuminates the harms caused by stereotyping and suggests some courses of action. (shrink)